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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28066785">blessings denied, blessings shared</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai'>venndaai</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Book 6: Return of the Thief (Queen's Thief), M/M, Pining, implied past Costis/Gen/Irene</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 17:00:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,811</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28066785</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’ll come back for you,” Costis said. “Kamet, I swear on all the gods I’ll-”</p><p>“Don’t,” Kamet interrupted, a hand quickly rising to cover Costis’s mouth. “Don’t swear an oath you might not be able to keep.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kamet/Costis Ormentiedes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>blessings denied, blessings shared</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/gifts">Lirazel</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy Yuletide!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Poor Costis,” was the first thing the king said, when Costis reported to his rooms as summoned, after the excitement of the audience chamber. “Are you very angry at me?”</p><p>“What should I be angry about, your majesty?” Costis asked. He’d been angry earlier, and upset in a deep, aching way, but that had all drained away over the last half hour, and he suddenly felt very tired. There was a kind of unreality to the solid stone walls of the king’s chamber, the familiar furniture and linens which had not changed much in all the months he had been gone. He’d thought of this reunion so often, maybe even longed for it a little, and the longing had kept him going through all the days of desert and toil, but now it was here and the sight of the king’s half-smile was not enough to ease the weight on his heart, the ache in his stomach. For so many days he’d always had Kamet near enough to touch, and now the absence was a void that nothing could fill. </p><p>“I used you,” the king said. He was solemn. Not quite like he’d been in the audience chamber, but definitely not in one of his mercurial moods.</p><p>“It is your majesty’s right to use me,” Costis said, distantly relieved that the words came so easily, that he wasn’t being asked to break through the tiredness and actually think.</p><p>The king threw himself down in his chair by the window. “Sit down, before you make me strain my neck staring up at you,” he said, with a wave of his hooked hand. Costis hesitated; there was no other chair. After a moment, he sat down very gingerly on the edge of the bed.</p><p>“Closer,” the king commanded, and Costis obediently shuffled sideways, until his knees and the king’s were nearly touching. Costis fixed his gaze on the wall hanging just to the right of the king’s head, as that seemed safest. </p><p>“Did you enjoy your trip?”</p><p>Costis thought about the lion, about the slavers, about the well, about lying half-dead in the slums of Zaboar. “I met interesting people,” he said, “and learned many valuable things.”</p><p>“You met my friend Kamet,” the king said. “What do you think of him?”</p><p>Costis didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t think he needed to. The king just looked into his face, and whatever he saw there made him nod, and chuckle. </p><p>“I hoped you might like him,” he said. “I’m glad, Costis, truly. But he won’t be staying here long. This palace isn’t an easy home for foreigners, and besides, I have a job in mind for him.”</p><p>“Where are you sending him?” Costis heard himself say, even as the ache in his stomach tightened into a fist. </p><p>“Out of Attolia,” the king said. “Would you leave my service, Costis, to chase after him? You’ve only just returned.”</p><p>“I would never betray my oath, your majesty,” Costis said. He was tired. He’d gotten a few days of rest on the ship, but he’d still been recovering from his illness, and he’d been worried about Kamet, so stricken with what Costis had hoped was seasickness and feared was the fever that had nearly done for Costis. And then last night he’d been in the palace dungeons, and he hadn’t slept, even when Kamet had drifted off, curled up and silent in his cell.  </p><p>The king reached out with his hand, and his knuckles brushed against Costis’s face. Costis held very still. “But you’d want to,” the king said. </p><p>Costis turned his head, just a little, so that he could see the king grinning again. </p><p>“Really, Costis, I’m happy for you, I swear.”  </p><p>He should have expected this, Costis thought; it wasn’t like he’d ever held any mysteries for the King of Attolia. </p><p>“The queen,” Costis said, hesitantly.</p><p>“The gods were merciful,” the king said. “She will be fine.”</p><p>“I am sorry,” Costis said. “Your majesty, I am so sorry.”</p><p>The king turned his face away. </p><p>“Go home, Costis,” he said. “Go visit your family. Come back in a month, and I’ll send you off with dear Kamet.” </p><p>Costis pushed his tired body upright, and then into a bow, and then, as he was straightening, a memory hit him like a sack full of bricks. “I shouted at Teleus,” he said. “Oh, gods. I told him he was an idiot.”</p><p>“Good thing I’m not sending you back to the Guard, then.” </p><p>Costis’s face must have been doing something amusing, because the king laughed then, fully. Costis had the impression he hadn’t done that much, recently. </p><p>“My king,” Costis said, and bowed, and left.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He went back to the guard barracks, first. There was someone new sleeping in his room now, but he found Aris in the cafeteria, just off duty, and they went to Costis’s old favorite wineshop in the city and drank for hours, Aris telling Costis several unbelievable stories about what had been happening on the Little Peninsula during his absence, then pressing Costis for tales of his adventures. At first Costis was happy to oblige, but after the third story he realized all he was doing was talking about Kamet. How small and proud and funny he had been, how his cleverness had gotten them out of one scrape and then another. Costis heard his words, his laughter, trail off into silence. </p><p>“Well, fuck me,” Aris said. “And here I thought you only had eyes for our King. Or our Queen. Or both.”</p><p>“Shut up,” Costis said, quicker than he’d meant to- it wasn’t as though he hadn’t heard those rumors before. Aris put his hands up.</p><p>“I only mean to say,” Aris said, “that your new friend sounds like someone special.”</p><p>“I don’t know if he wants anything more to do with me,” Costis said. </p><p>Aris snorted. He leaned forward and patted Costis’s arm. “If he’s put up with you this long, he likes you,” Aris said. “Trust me.” </p><p>A boy ran up to their table. “Delivery for Costis Ormentiedes, from the palace,” he said, and handed Costis a pouch that clinked, and a note in a terrible scrawl that read, “Try not to lose this one.”</p><p>“Oh, thank the gods, just in time,” Costis said, suddenly realizing he’d had no money with which to pay his bill.</p><p>Aris clapped him on the arm. “It’s good to see you back in one piece, you beautiful bastard,” he said. </p><p>“Glad to be seen,” Costis said, and then cleared his throat. “But, Aris, the king’s sending me home for a month and then I’m not sure-  I don’t know when I’ll be back. If- if I’ll be back.”</p><p>“Well, at least I’m used to saying my goodbyes with you now,” Aris said philosophically, and then he pulled Costis into a bone-cracking embrace. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><br/>
Costis rented a horse from the palace stables. He thought about trying to see Kamet, before he left, but when he asked after his whereabouts he was told that Kamet was closeted in secret meetings and saw no one. So he rented a horse and set off for his family’s farm with nothing but the clothes on his back and the pouch full of the king’s gold. He stopped in the business district of the capitol, and bought belated wedding gifts for Thalia and her husband, and something smaller for his father. He felt obscurely regretful not to have brought something out of his time in the Mede Empire, to give to his family, but all he had brought was Kamet. </p><p>The journey home was pleasant, and felt like a holiday. It was spring, the most beautiful time in Attolia, and the fields were being planted, and the hills were greener than their usual brown. He heard people singing planting songs, as he rode past. He stayed in small roadside inns, and talked and laughed with his countrymen, and it was pleasant, to speak easily in his own native tongue, and it was a relief, not to be hiding who and what he was. And yet. They did say travel changed a man.</p><p>And on the second night he lit a candle and purchased paper and borrowed a writing set from the innkeeper, and tried to write a letter. </p><p>The expensive paper ended up crumpled in the bottom of his saddlebags, but superstitiously, he didn’t throw out even the smeared abandoned attempt at Kamet’s name. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><br/>
On his return journey, he finally wrote something that satisfied him, and when he rode into the palace and stabled the horse, he took the rolled up letter with his stuffed bag from the saddlebags, and took it with him to the docks, intending to give it to Kamet if Kamet declined Costis’s company on the voyage to Roa. </p><p>It ended up staying in his bag for three months, until one day when Kamet took it upon himself to finally unpack all of their remaining belongings and tidy up their cottage, and discovered the letter. Costis came home from his daily walk on the cliffside to see Kamet sitting at the table, the letter unfurled in front of him. Costis saw the tiny flinch in Kamet’s body when Costis entered, the flicker of fear in his eyes quickly repressed. So he grinned, and hung his head a bit in embarrassment. “I’d forgotten about that,” he said. </p><p>“I’m sorry,” Kamet said. “I suppose it is- an automatic bad habit of mine, to read any letter I come across regardless of whether it is intended for my eyes.”</p><p>“It was hardly intended for anyone else’s,” Costis said, and sat down across from him, plenty of space in between them. </p><p>Kamet looked up at him. Life in Roa agreed with Kamet, Costis thought frequently. He wore his hair long but neat. He’d gained weight, and when he smiled more than half the time it was with his eyes. </p><p>“Did you mean what you wrote?” he asked. </p><p>“I can’t really remember what nonsense I wrote,” Costis said, “but- yes, I meant it. I still do. You’re the bravest man I know, and it’s been the greatest fortune of my life to know you.” </p><p>“Immakuk and Ennikar,” Kamet said, tracing the words on the paper with one slender finger.</p><p>“Immakuk and Ennikar,” Costis agreed. </p><p>“There’s one tablet whose translation I never recited to you,” Kamet said, and his tone was very serious, and very nervous, in a way he hadn’t been in weeks. </p><p>Costis waited, and when Kamet didn’t go on, Costis said, “I would love to hear it.” </p><p>So Kamet told him about the mourning of Immakuk for Ennikar, when the Queen of the Night stole him away, how he had mourned like a husband for his wife, how he had wept like a woman who had lost her child, how he had wandered stricken with the loss of his love. No food enticed him, no maiden satisfied him, he only thought of the food he had shared with his friend, of the pleasure they had shared together.</p><p>Costis listened, and felt a blush growing in his cheeks, and he looked at Kamet, as the lilting words died away, as the concentration of recitation left Kamet and he looked back at Costis and they looked at each other. </p><p>“So, so, so,” Costis said. </p><p>“So,” Kamet agreed, and leaned forward over the table, and kissed him. </p><p>Costis had been kissed before, by a decent number of men and a few women too. Some of the people who’d kissed him had been very good at it. None of them had been Kamet. </p><p>When Kamet started to draw back, Costis put his right hand over Kamet’s, where it rested on the table, and with his left he put a hand on Kamet’s cheek, feeling the soft scratch of his neatly trimmed little beard, and he realized his whole mental picture of the world up until now had been incomplete, because it hadn’t included Costis and Kamet sitting together in the house that was theirs on the cliffs of Roa, sitting together and being together, touching each other like this; and now it did. The difference was staggering.</p><p>“Is the weather still pleasant outside?” Kamet asked, after a while.</p><p>“Very,” Costis answered. </p><p>“We should sit outside, and enjoy it,” Kamet said. </p><p>“Yes,” Costis agreed, but it still took them a while to let go of each other’s hands, and stand up.</p><p>They went outside. The sun was low in the sky, but the air was still warm. They sat on the rough wooden bench and Costis looked out at the purple landscape for a moment, and then he looked back at Kamet, and Kamet was looking at him.  </p><p>“What are you thinking?” Costis asked. </p><p>Kamet snorted. “That I am a fool,” he said. “I seem to have that thought often, around you.”</p><p>Costis grinned, and held out his hand. Kamet took it without any hesitation, and Costis wondered what he’d ever done to deserve the feeling spreading through him. </p><p>“How long have you been waiting, for me to figure it out?” Kamet asked. </p><p>“Only since the day we left Attolia,” Costis said. “I thought for sure that you could read the way I felt all over my face, on the docks. Possibly I overestimated your eyesight.” Kamet slapped him lightly on the knee with his free hand, and Costis grinned wider, and then he said, “But I knew how I felt that night in-” He stopped, and felt the grin slip off his face. “That night in the slaver’s camp,” he said, more quietly. </p><p>They were both quiet then. “That long?” Kamet said, after a moment. He sounded wondering, amazed.</p><p>“I thought I gave it away in Zaboar,” Costis admitted. </p><p>“As has already been established, I am a fool,” Kamet said, and then he giggled. Costis thought Kamet’s high, breathy giggle might be the most beautiful sound in the world. “But so are you. I have been thinking about kissing you since I pulled you out of that well covered in flour.”</p><p>Costis opened his mouth. Kamet covered it with his hand. “Do not make that sound,” he admonished sternly, “or I will be laughing too hard to do anything else.”</p><p>“But I love it when you laugh,” Costis said, “woo-ooo-oo,” and he pulled Kamet into his lap and kissed him again as they both giggled, as much from relief and pure joy as from anything else. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The end of the world came suddenly and quietly.</p><p>He’d been out on an overnight scouting trip, and was returning, approaching the little house from the cliffs to the north, following a narrow goat trail. The cliffs and their coating of scrub and furze were blue and purple in the twilight, traces of pink flame still lingering on the distant horizon, out over the ocean. Spring’s brief scatter of flowers was a thing of distant memory now, but the air still smelled fragrant, and he could hear the songs of evening birds, the susurrus of the ocean breeze in the furze, and the distant calls of herd animals. </p><p>He was thinking about the new plants he’d found, the samples he would send back to Attolia and the ones he’d show to Kamet, and he was thinking about his bed, so much warmer and softer than a single blanket out on the bluffs, and he was humming an old Attolian country song about birds at twilight, when he came up over the last hummock and saw the dark shape of the little house, alone in the purple landscape aside from the smaller huddled forms of the outhouse and the goat shed. Seeing it, he felt happiness wash over him in a wave, the way it always did, every time. Maybe that was the real reason why he kept going on these longer trips; so he’d get to feel that bone deep joy on his return. </p><p>The simple wooden bench was right next to the cottage door, and he sat there and worked his boots off, one at a time, feeling the ache in his back and legs. He sat there for a minute, putting off the moment when he’d truly be home, feeling the sweet anticipation grow. Then he got up. </p><p>“I’m back,” he called, pushing open the unlocked door.   </p><p>It was a two-room cottage, and one corner of the main room had a desk in it. Kamet was seated there, on his chair, his back to Costis, shoulders hunched, the scratch of a stylus audible in the quiet house. </p><p>“For Miras’s sake, Kamet, light a lamp,” Costis said, vague fantasies of sweet reunions evaporating under the sudden weight of concern. “You’ll strain your eyes.” One of their three lamps was on the kitchen table. He lit it and brought it over to the desk. </p><p>When he got close enough to cast flickering shadows over the desk, Kamet turned his head and looked up at him. There was no warm and welcoming smile, or the frown that meant Costis was in trouble and didn’t know it yet. Kamet’s face was blank, but looking at Costis, his mouth twitched a little. </p><p>“All right,” Costis said. “Tell me.”</p><p>“The Medes have brought their army overland,” Kamet said, blinking, and then he turned away again, looking down towards his writing. Numbers, Costis realized suddenly, calculations in the Mede style. “Mede commissioners are in the capitol, and moving through the towns. Down in the market they are planning to drive all their surplus to Pent tomorrow. Petar is going to try to sell even that old nag of his. He told me he’s willing to take our goats, if we want to sell them.” </p><p>There was a stool not too far from the desk. Costis pulled it over, and sat down. </p><p>“Ah,” he said. “They came overland.” All his scouting along the clifftops had been for naught.<br/>
 <br/>
“What they are buying would feed seventy thousand,” Kamet said.</p><p>“Seventy- Petar told you-”</p><p>“He told me they have bought up all the livestock and grain to be had in every town from here to Susun.”</p><p>“You know exactly how much that is?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“You thought this would happen,” Costis realized. “You’ve been collecting numbers, preparing for this.” </p><p>“I’d hoped we’d have more time,” Kamet said. “I am a selfish man, Costis,” he said, and he turned his head again, and this time Costis noticed what he hadn’t before. Kamet’s eyes were red and wet. He had been crying, alone, before Costis had come in. </p><p>Costis reached for him, and Kamet put up a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” he said.</p><p>“All right,” Costis said, and pulled himself together and took a moment to think. “All right. I’ll saddle the horse and go look for this supply chain.” </p><p>Kamet nodded. “Here,” he said, and pulled something out from under his desk, offering it up. It was Costis’s emergency travel bag, packed cleverly to conceal how much it contained. Enough for a week’s travel. Costis stared at it.</p><p>“After you find the supply wagons, you have to take the news to Attolia at once,” Kamet said.</p><p>Costis switched from staring at the bag to staring at him. “I’m not about to leave you,” he said, hearing a hint of a laugh at the edges of his voice, because the idea was just so absurd.</p><p>“They’ll already be spreading spies and lookouts,” Kamet said. “I’m too foreign. The Mede will be searching for the Sitran slave who betrayed Nahuseresh. If I’m with you, we’ll be caught, and Attolia will not be warned.” </p><p>Costis took a breath, and then let it out.</p><p>“I know he’s looking for you,” he said, slowly. “Which is why I won’t leave you here to be-” His calm evaporated with each word, until he had to break himself off or start shouting. He remembered Kamet in the desert, blood streaming down his face, sobbing, <em>Do you have any idea, you imbecile, what they do, what they do…</em> Costis, sweating, still on fire from recent combat, had looked at him, the elegant, handsome, coldly intellectual secretary to the powerful, suddenly transformed, vulnerable, so human and terrified, and all he’d wanted to do then was hold him close and keep him protected. So maybe it had started there, the thing currently stealing his breath, and he just hadn’t recognized it for what it was until a freezing night in the hills north of Zaboar, when, starving and cold and in excruciating pain and suffocating despair, he’d felt Kamet’s slight body going limp beneath his weight, saw the terror slip off his face as he lost consciousness. </p><p>Now, once more facing death by torture, Kamet was composed, with no hint of that terror, only regret in the redness of his eyes. That calmness frightened Costis.</p><p>“I don’t want you to go,” Kamet said. “I want us both to run. But where is there to run to?” He gave Costis a smile that trembled. </p><p>Costis sat down. He took the bag from Kamet’s hands, and turned it around and around in his own. He put it down. He walked outside. The sunset was almost as it had been before, the hills only a slightly darker shade of purple. The birds were still singing. He looked at the outside of their little house. He looked at the little wooden bench, and thought about picking it up and breaking it, but Kamet loved that bench. He sat out there in the mornings and evenings, and at night when it wasn’t too cold, when he could tell Costis stories about the constellations from across the Empire, about the Great Swallow and the Goddess Anuni and Unse-sek, put in the sky by his grieving mother after he was killed by Immakuk and Ennikar. </p><p>Costis went back inside. Kamet was standing by the table, holding the bag. Costis went up to him.</p><p>“I’ll come back for you,” Costis said. “Kamet, I swear on all the gods I’ll-”</p><p>“Don’t,” Kamet interrupted, a hand quickly rising to cover Costis’s mouth. “Don’t swear an oath you might not be able to keep.” </p><p>Costis stared at him mulishly, until Kamet took his hand away, and kissed him instead.</p><p>When Costis could speak again, he said, “Immakuk didn’t leave Ennikar in the underworld, did he? You didn’t leave me in the well. I’ll come back.”</p><p>“Idiot Attolian. Most foolish of men. My stubborn Costis," Kamet said. "Just don’t swear on the gods. Please. For my sake.”</p><p>Costis closed his eyes. “All right,” he said.</p><p>“Thank you,” Kamet said, and kissed him again.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Kamet has served his purpose,” Attolia Irene said in the echoing audience chamber of the Attolian palace. </p><p>Costis’s queen was as beautiful, and as austere in her beauty, as always. She seemed a little frailer since her miscarriage, but that might have only been Costis’s increased awareness of her mortality. Still, she seemed a marble statue of the Great Goddess herself, for all that Costis could read the affection in her hand on her king’s arm. She was power, and perfection. She was Attolia. She was Costis’s queen, who he had sworn to serve until his death. He still loved her as fiercely as the day he had first seen her.</p><p>Costis stood in the audience chamber, legs and back still aching from his punishing ride, and thought about oaths, and the cost of breaking them. He thought about Captain Teleus, who he had shamed once already. He thought about Aristogiton, sensitive to the currents of palace politics and reputation because he had to be, who had still remained a loyal friend throughout Costis’s multiple disgraces. He thought of his father, the little plot of land that could so easily be confiscated or taxed out of existence or burned by an invading imperial army; he thought of his sister, newly wed and pregnant, planning for a family and a future. He thought of his gods, the oaths he had sworn to them, the displeasure fated to be visited upon those who broke such oaths. He thought of his king, sitting uncharacteristically quietly on his throne, his wife’s hand on his arm, his eyes on Costis’s face. </p><p>He thought of Kamet, his face the morning after the escape from the slavers, as they sat with their backs to the rock, and Kamet, his bare neck ringed with purple bruises, had said, “I’m sorry. I was afraid.”</p><p>Costis opened his mouth to speak. </p><p>“To risk Costis as well as Kamet is poor tactics, I agree,” said the queen. “However, we must consider that if we order him to remain with the guard, his heart is unlikely to be in his work.”</p><p>And she looked at him, and though her face didn’t move, there was something like a smile in her eyes. </p><p>“Go,” she said, releasing him from his bonds to gods and throne. “And be blessed in all your endeavors.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Before Costis left he visited the row of temples on the outskirts of the city, and he sacrificed to Miras, his god, and Eugenides, his king’s god, to bring him swiftly and safely to Kamet’s side. Then, though she did not have a temple in the capital of Attolia, he burnt incense and prayed to Shesmegah, the Mede goddess of mercy, that she might remember Kamet as one of her most gentle and kind followers, and protect him.  </p><p>Then he rode the king’s fastest, most reliable horse out of the city, out of an Attolia that did not yet know the tidal wave bearing down upon it. He rode away from high ground, towards the wave, and prayed again and again that it had not already crushed the thing most precious to him. </p><p> </p><p>He had made the trip south in two weeks. Returning took nearly twice as long. The Mede were everywhere in Roa now, and every road had checkpoints. He was stopped and caught twenty miles south of the temple complex, and had to fight to escape, losing his horse; he spent the final day of his journey on foot, bloody and afraid. </p><p>He smelled smoke and ash before he even saw the remains of the house. </p><p>There were two soldiers guarding the ruins, though not very well. He killed them both, and then had no one to question. He wasted some time after that, on his knees in the ruins, digging through the ash with his hands. There were some fragments of pottery, the burnt husks of furniture, pieces of parchment that dissolved into dust at a touch. There were no bones. The ash got into his nose and his mouth and he thought for a while that maybe he’d died and was in the underworld, like Ennikar, but Immakuk wasn’t going to come and save him this time. </p><p>Then after a while he came back to himself, and remembered the scribes at the temple. If any were still there, they would know what had happened. If Kamet had been killed or if he had been taken, if he was somewhere that Costis could still reach or die trying. </p><p>He waited until night, in a copse near the ruins. He saw scribes leave the complex, going home for the night, and waited until it grew dark, and the place’s guardian, an old woman with a large oil lamp, came around to close the gate. </p><p>“Dana,” he called, from the shadows, his hand on his sword. </p><p>She gasped, and then after a moment, said tentatively, “Khosrus?” using the name Costis had gone by in Roa. </p><p>“Yes,” Costis said, wondering how desperate and dangerous he looked. “Yes, it’s me. Dana, please, do you know what happened to Kay? Can you tell me? Please.” He swallowed, and said again, “Please.” </p><p>Without another word she took his hand, and led him into the ruins. Down wide uneven steps, down into darkness, stone and earth walls illuminated by the oil lamp. </p><p>“Kay,” she called, at the bottom, and Costis barely had time to let out a breath before the shadows at the edge of the lamp shifted, and then the darkness became Kamet, blinking, looking exhausted but alive. </p><p>Costis saw Kamet’s face change, and then Kamet was rushing forward, trying to hold Costis up as Costis’s knees gave out beneath him. Costis stumbled, struggled, and got himself upright again, Kamet’s arm warm around his shoulder. </p><p>“Gods have mercy, Costis, when did you last eat or sleep?” Kamet asked, and then made a surprised noise as Costis shifted to wrap Kamet in his arms. </p><p>“It’s all right, Dana,” he heard Kamet say. “Thank you. No, take the lamp, I have mine. Thank you again.” And then Kamet’s hands were on Costis’s face and Kamet was murmuring, “Oh, my Costis,” again and again and again. </p><p>"Yours," Costis agreed. How did the poem go again?</p><p>
  <em>What have you learned?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Learned about welcome and unwelcome. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Gates closed and gates open. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Blessings denied and blessings shared.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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